1889.) BENpIRE on the Nest and Eggs of Clarke's Nutcracker. 233 
I had scarcely gotten two feet from the nest before she was on it again. 
During the whole time she remained perfectly silent. Not half an hour 
after finding the first, I had found a second nest which contained three 
young birds perhaps a week old. These I sacrificed to science, making a 
skin of one and preserving the other two in alcohol. They are now, 
as well as the nest, deposited in the National Museum at Washington, 
D.C. Between April 24th and zoth,’76, [ found at least a dozen more 
nests; these, however, contained all young in different stages of growth, 
some of them nearly large enough to leave the nest. Each of these con- 
tained but three young. 
‘‘In the spring of ?77 I commenced my search on March 15th, and al- 
though I looked carefully and repeatedly over the entire ground gone over 
the year before, and over new localities as well, I failed to see a single bird 
where on the previous season they had been found comparatively plenty. 
Puzzled to account for their absence I looked around for the possible cause 
of it, and knowing that these birds live almost exclusively on the seeds 
of the pine (in fact, all the specimens I have ever dissected, shot mostly 
in the winter months, however, had their crops filled with these seeds and 
nothing else), I naturally first examined the trees for their principal food 
supply and found that not a tree in a hundred bore ripe cones, and 
although there were many green ones I found none mature. This fact, 
then, accounted fully and plainly for their absence. During the next 
winter, 77-78, I found a few of these birds occupying their old haunts 
again, but not nearly as many as in previous seasons, and I commenced 
my search as usual again in the latter part of March. On April 4, 1878, 
I found my first nest. It was placed near the extremity of a small limb, 
about forty feet from the ground, very hard to get at, and in trying to pull 
the limb down somewhat with a rope so that it could be reached from a 
lower limb it broke and the eggs were thrown out of the nest. This also 
contained three eggs, and incubation, at this early date even, was far ad- 
vanced. 
“¢On April 8th, ’78, I found another nest containing two eggs with good- 
sized embryos. This was likewise placed in a pine tree and near the 
extremity of one of the limbs, about sixteen feet from the ground. The 
only way this nest could be got at was by leaning a pole against the 
limbs of the tree and climbing to the nest by it, in which, after a good 
deal of labor and trouble, I finally succeeded. 
“The type specimens obtained by me measured respectively 1.22 X0.95 
inches and 1.20X0.90 inches. The ground color of these eggs is a light 
grayish green and they are irregularly spotted and blotched with a deeper 
shade of gray, principally about the larger end. On the smaller egg the 
spots are finer and more evenly distributed. The last two eggs obtained 
are somewhat larger, measuring 1.26X0.95 and 1.30X0.g2 inches. Their 
markings although somewhat finer are about the same as in the type 
specimens. They are elongated, oval in shape and considerably pointed 
at the smallerend. The second set of eggs found by me, which, unfor- 
tunately, were broken, were more of a greenish ground color and also 
